Sunday, 24 November 2013

Refitting on-the-fly with mobile depots: viable flexibility?

Pre-Rubicon I had been thinking a lot about the potential PvP flexibility offered by mobile depots. You might be flying around in railgun Moas (for example) and then come across an assault frigate gang. Couldn't the FC just drop a mobile depot and all your Moas are suddenly fitted with blasters, micro-warpdrives and a tackle module?

Further discussion ~after the break~!

Well, the actual Rubicon expansion doused those plans a bit with two limitations on the depot's use:

The mobile depot has to be placed for a minute before it goes online.

The mobile depot is personal. Others cannot use a depot that your character drops. Further, it impossible to trade the depot in space via jettisoning it to a can.

As such, using the depot to refit on the fly is something that far fewer fleets will do. Firstly, any refitting may cause you to lose your engagement window. A minute can be a long time in Eve! In that minute the fleet that was on the other side of that gate might decide to leave, their scouts might detect you etc. Not to mention the fact that if the other fleet detects a large number of depots on scan, they will be able to guess what you're doing! Secondly, if the depots are personal then every single member of the fleet must remember to bring one.However given their low production cost, this is not as much of a problem as would first appear.

So what would be a cheap hull, good for the current meta, to try this with?

Well, with all the frigate gangs roaming around, rapid light missile Caracals? Consider starting out with a fleet including 10 of these:

[Caracal, HMMWD2RLML]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
F85 Peripheral Damage System I

I'm assuming that those mods won't cost more than 10mil and will probably cost substantially less.

I would like to test before I endorse it completely. However if you do want to take out a fleet that is a very hard-counter to one doctrine (e.g. frigates) but is not good against anything else (rapid light missile Caracals) then this could be a good back-up plan.